


nine life girl

by gatsbyparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Graphic depictions of violence - Freeform, Immortality, Moirallegiance, becoming the queenly mask
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 20:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>meenah peixes; young empress, condesce-that-will-be, rising star of the imperium. expert in all she needs to be to rule an empire. keep a close ocular on her hands, her claws, her bangles. file down those vicious teeth and lock away that clever thinkpan. above all, be wary: she does not stay dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nine life girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Megan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megan/gifts).



> Meenah and her idol/alternate universe self meet. Is Condesce everything Meenah ever dreamed of, or is she disillusioned with the reality? You can use whatever setting you want for this (alternate timelines, dreambubbles, the current point in canon via death shenanigans or shellphone call, whatever works for you) and take it in either direction. Or another way entirely, if you want! Do they set off together into space to start an intergalactic empire of baking and bling? Steal the choice weed from Damara and have an increasingly stoned discussion about anything you want? Seriously, anything you want to do for these two together is great.

No one’s seen the sun since before the Imperium, before the Empire, before the Condesce-That-Was descended the thirty seven great silver steps of her capital warship to base dirt of this first colonial backwater world, turned to the prostrate forms flung on the ground, her peoples and her magistrates and courtiers of all the rungs of the blood ladder, and declared, “Cover that goddamn thing up, it’s burning my eyes.” Such fear as the people had-or respect, or adoration, or at least such pragmatism as is required to bend one’s head, shut one’s mouth, and get on with what is required-was enough that this first Imperial edict was not only heard, but obeyed, and thus no one has seen the star in this system, or indeed any other, since. Certainly not in your lifetime, they haven’t.

Back and back and back, since your Ancestor took her first hesitant steps off the homeworld to conquer all the known worlds and some otherwise, your people and all others have known the darkness. It isn’t so bad, on the old core worlds and the homeworld, where the double moons are better and safer and brighter than any sun. This, among other reasons, is why you’ve chosen to spend your sabbatical on Earth; the very first of the colony worlds, with great infrastructure that spans the whole of continents, and a native people that fought but bent. One moon, true, and more’s the pity, but with the artificial one beside it is nearly as good as Alternia’s two natural.

You’d started in a city that had once only been a few hundred miles square, but now extends a neat thousand miles out into the ocean proper. Your guardians had thought it appropriate that the Imperial presence on Earth should begin in a city that came from the water and now returns to it; you aren’t inclined to obey, exactly, but you really didn’t know enough to argue with. An heiress must never argue out of spite. This has been beaten into you your entire life, mostly through object lessons, in debates that you lose every single time because you have nothing better to work with than your inherent dislike of being told what to do. Spite is no basis for anything, so you’d gone with what they told you, and then you’d fucked right off as soon as no one was looking.

You stand on a rooftop, the toes of your boots hanging over the edge. It only took a scramble up a rotting drain and a couple of hard knocks to your ribs to get up here. You don’t think that last hit, from a rusty weathervane, even bruised. Your boots are leather on the tops but the toes are all metal, clinking against the concrete when you shift to keep your balance in the wind. The metal is interleaved like fish scales. It pinches like a motherfucker even through your socks, but it looks cool in pictures. Your hair-there is no hair anywhere in the Empire as lovely as yours, as long and as thick and as identical to the Condesce-That-Was, which you know and preen about because everyone tells you so-whips out behind you in the gale. It’s very windy, on this planet. You begin to wish that you had worn something heavier, but your wardrobe was planned around diplomatic meetings. Your poor fancy tunic and leggings were not meant to withstand this kind of battering. You look down at the rips and preen a little. There’s one right through the middle of your symbol, and the sacrilege gives you a tiny flutter of rebelliousness. This is the Imperial body and the Imperial symbol. No one dares desecrate the Imperial symbol or the Imperial body, and yet here you have done it.

You turn back to shimmy down the drainpipe, but the concrete below your heels gives at last and you fall six stories, hit, roll, and drop the last four with a breathless whoop. You have a second or two to consider just how badly this is going to hurt, but it’s lost under the thrill of the drop.

It hurts worse than you could have thought. Impact results in what feels like a broken arm and a hard bounce, and the fragile bones of your thoracic cage, the delicate filaments inside your gills, the long twists of cartilage that line your airways, all grind together, and you inhale again and again in loud obnoxious whoops but the air doesn’t come in. You begin to kick, senseless instinctive motions. You have to get into the water, you have to get out of the way, off into some dark little corner where you can hole up and watch the entrance and lash out at anything that comes near. You make it a couple of feet, scraping your back open. You can see the bloody trail you’re leaving. Something in your esophagus trips, with an audible click like a lightswitch. You breathe a little, through secondary, rudimentary airways already beginning to depressurize. You regret ever leaving the spawning pools.

You knock your horns hard off the curb, but you’re already dizzy. It’s high enough that you can push yourself up a little, sitting half against it, and push harder with your legs. Your leggings snare on the concrete and tear harder, baring a long expanse of your thigh under the thick embroidery. Your breaths begin to catch, and you make the hideous wailing noise of a panicking grub. Between one beat and the next your heart stops. There is systole, that last hard slam, and then nothing, just a cold drop. Things like this do not happen to the Imperial body. This is happening in the third person. You do not want to be here.

You are gone, but your body is still here, still kicking and thrashing onto the curb. You watch yourself die. As the sky begins to lighten and the temperature to drop, you open your eyes, and see the dawn for the first time in your life, just before it darkens back to night. It is gold, and gold, and gold again. This is your self, in whom you are well pleased.

You make it back to the Imperial district at a run, though you have to stop frequently to catch your breath and you get lost a dozen times. This is the farthest you have ever gone on your own. There is no evidence of your misadventure besides the blood-tangled knots in your hair and the rips in your clothing. The guardsmen don’t want to let you in, but you’re not the heiress to nothing. They recognize you, after a moment, and for that you only have half a dozen of them executed.

You stand in the room you’ve been given, saying nothing, letting your guardians inspect and fuss and bitch. It doesn’t matter what they tell you, what they threaten to pry words out of you when you’re clamped tight as a shell. You’ve got a mystery chasing round in your head. You’d been dead, you are more than sure of that. Your heart stopped and your brain stopped and everything that made this sack of meat Meenah Peixes had been dust on the Earth wind. And yet here you are, whole and unmarked from the experience.

You popped back from dying like a rubber ball off a cement floor. The tailor, with her tapering fingers fluttering careful over your gills, feels no grave chill coming from your skin. Something is very wrong with you.

You allow yourself to forget, or maybe you force yourself. The whole bizarre experience becomes nothing more than an oddity, a footnote in the two sweeps you spend on Earth. It’s a fascinating place, strange but not so strange as to make you angry about it. It is an Imperially sanctioned kind of strange, not threatening or rebellious, but unique, like a flower growing the opposite direction of the others. You slip your lead now and again, but some lingering suspicion keeps you from pushing it too far.

In any case, there is more than enough to keep you busy. You are ever, ever learning statecraft. Boring as the lessons are, this all comes naturally to you. You have never had to worry who to favor or who to disregard, never thought twice about charming and flattering, not spared a moment’s consideration for how something might affect your reputation. Things simply work for you, and it isn’t as if the Reigning Empress, may she live a thousand sweeps, pays you any attention as long as you aren’t causing trouble. Earth is humanity’s birthright, but all else is yours, and you glory in it.

The gravity here is different. A little heavier, not enough to throw you off, but enough to make you stronger after your trident exercises. Strictly ceremonial, you’re told, but you know that even these watered down forms would take only a bit of bloodthirsty tweaking to do real damage. You don’t take any more long dives off of short buildings, but you do manage to do a decent amount of exploring in your stolen moments. There is never anyone around when you’re out, which strikes you as a bit odd, but then you suppose that very few people would want to live this close to the Imperial quarter. The taxes are highest and the upkeep is strict, meaning vagrants don’t tend to stick around long, and with the rents you could charge here, they would all become vagrants very quickly.

You wander the streets, keeping to the shadows even though there’s no one to see. The moons are high and bright, the bay is laid out at your feet, and the walls of the Imperial quarter are far behind you. The water stretches out endless, waveless, silent under the moonlight. It fills you up wholesale. You leave your shoes on the dock, a stupid landdweller affectation when everything you wear is meant for this, and slip into the water. Sure as you’re born, it’s easier than being landside. Your hair billows out when you kick forward. Your neat, plain blouse is untucked from your skirt by the tide. You really don’t care. You have no idea how to tuck it back in, but you’ll want to go straight into ‘cupe by the time you’re back, and you prefer to be naked in the slime.

You breach surface after a bit, just so you can compare the view of the moons from below to the view from above. It isn’t so different. You cross your arms, resting them on the water, and make like you’re leaning against them. You have neutral buoyancy, so you just kind of dip into the waves a little instead of going anywhere.

“Hey!” someone hollers from the dock. You twist round, taking the whole thing in at a glance. Six people on the dock, lowblood stout, one holding your shoes aloft.

“Who the shell are you?” you bark.

“Who the hell are you?” the first one barks back.

No one will ever mistake you for anything but who you are. The high, proud arc of your horns, the arch tilt of your jaw into your fins, the endless abundance of your hair, the sleek beauty that comes of a pampered lifetime-you could never be taken as anything but the heiress. His confusion makes absolutely no sense to you.

“Who the shell are you?” you repeat. One of the others detaches from the group, moving in the dim, shadowy light that never goddamn brightens on this planet, and makes his way over. The two of them talk for a bit, and then the first one turns back to you.

“You got thirty seconds to get outta the water, lady.”

You stare at him.

“You got hella audacity,” you tell him primly. “Fuck that.”

“We warned you,” he says with a little shrug. His sharp overhand toss is when you start to worry. When the grenade bursts the moment it touches the surface, you flip and dive. The chain of explosions follows you down. This is six, seven grenades at once, all launched at the Imperial body. You are incandescently furious, lighting up tyrian along your arms and fins. You’re fast, faster than any other seadweller on the planet, but even you can’t outrun the pressure wave of a single grenade, never mind six.The water forms a great plume, popping you over the surface, once again gasping for air in noisy graceless whoops. Your stomach drops out with inertia, and your gills seal shut in your panic. You drop to the ocean floor as the water slops back into place. You’re staring upwards, mouth open, but everything is red, and red, and red again. There is nothing for you to see. The bioluminescence along your arms and fins dulls and dies.

Blocked blood vessels and internal hemorrhaging pose no problem, you assume, when you start being able to assume again, some hours later. It’s slower this time, the coming back; first, the sticky unclogging of your nasals, loosening foul tasting bile that takes several obnoxious hacks to get rid of. Next, the cluster headache, such murder on your poor revenant brain that your vision swims for several precious minutes as it fades. As you feel more like a person and less like jam, you reach up and pop the bridge of your nose back into place. After a bit longer, you can even sit up and look around. None of your surroundings make any sense. You’re expecting to be underwater, and this looks like some filthy torture room out of a spy film. There are ugly tapestries hanging on the concrete.

“I’m gonna ruin you,” you say wheezily. You can hear your voice whistling from the hole in your throat. The little bean of a troll across the room looks you dead in the eye. Another shock in a day of dreadful shocks: no one looks the heiress dead in the eye. It’s like looking god dead in the eye.

“Got blood on your shirt, bitch,” she says, and leaves you. You look down after a minute of dizzy fumbling to find your face. She’s right. There is an awful lot of blood on your shirt. You’d worn one of the sturdier blouses in your wardrobe, with plainer embroidery; it’s only a dozen herons swooping low over a glittering harbor, with long waves that sweep into grassy plains across your side. Even your shower robe is more decorated than this. It’s completely rucked out of your skirt, of course. You are a torn, muddy shame of a girl. You shrug and set about trying to tuck your own shirt in for the first time in your life. The skirt unhooks round the back, then there’s six feet of fabric wound around your waist that has to come loose, and the underpins have to be undone and your pettis have to be pulled free of the ugly knot they’re bowed into before you can stuff the long tails of your blouse into your pettis. Then the underpins have to be put back into place down your spine where you can’t see them and you jab yourself in the ass a good eight times, then the sash has to be rewound awkwardly with one hand while you’re holding your skirt on, and then the last hooks have to be recaught. It’s an exhausting process. You don’t think you’ll be wanting to do it again.

You stand up after a little bit. At least, you take a crack at it. You wobble around muzzily for a while, wondering if there’s supposed to be two hands coming out of each wrist and have your feet always been this long? But of course you’re alright. You have no right not to be. The Imperial body is the property of the Empire and no one damages the Imperial body. Your breathing starts to slow to a more normal rate. Your head clears some more. You have two hands again. You lick a little blood off your hands, and then the brackish taste has you digging your fangs into the half-healed lacerations on your palms. You lick that all off too.

You clear your throat, look around some. Room’s filthy, you’re filthy, everything’s got the kind of grimy dark look you’d expect from a morgue or something. Now there’s an intriguing idea, you think. Maybe it is a morgue. You were pretty dead, after all. The door opens when you push it. Fair enough. You guess nobody expects the dead to get up again.

The hallway is empty. The stairs are empty. Angles like this, slant of the walls and the depth of the staircases, the place isn’t too big, doesn’t need a big staff. You don’t encounter a single person until you’ve reached a hatch and you’re about to haul yourself out. The stout little chick from before jabs at your shins while you’re dangling from the ladder. You crane yourself around to look at her without knocking your horns again. You’re dizzy enough without that.

“What?” you ask her crabbily. You don’t even care that these people kidnapped you and killed you. You just want to go home and go straight to ‘cupe.

“Don’t tell nobody what you saw today,” she insists.

“Why the shell would I?” you demand.

She appears to consider this. “You’re bein’ pretty damn casual. Maybe you saltlickers die all the time, fucked if I know. Whatever. But if you tell somebody we find you real quick, okay?”

“Yeah, whatever,” you say, and hike yourself up the ladder with your arms. This time, there’s no run to the Imperial quarter. It’s a drunken stagger where you get so lost that at one point you sit down and weep in frustration for a few minutes. You scuff your heels furiously into the cracked tarmac; if you were full grown instead of just hatching into your growth, you’d be strong enough that your fits would crack it twice as deep as the earthquakes have. You’re asleep on your feet by the time you reach the quarter. You drop into the guards in blind fury for not stopping you from leaving, neatly separating heads from spines and jugulars from their little throat-flesh niches.

“Got mugged by a couple humans, poarbably,” you tell the guardians while they’re inspecting you. “Like fuckin’ animals, these peelple.”

You can’t give them a description. You can’t give them much of anything. You’re far too exhausted. It takes your maids a long time to undo the muddle you made of your clothing, but soon enough you crash headfirst into ‘cupe and sleep for three days. You wake up with that nasty taste in your mouth from sleeping far too much, but you’re not dead, and that’s what counts. You cough up a few pieces of tissue gone hard and brown with dried blood along with a tooth or two.

Rebels, you’re assuming. Insurgents. Terrorists. Blowing up your bays and killing you and swearing you to silence about it, presumably so they can keep on disrupting the empress’ peace. Well. They can keep warming themselves under the sun of your benevolence. You have no interest in telling anyone what happened. You can handle it yourself.

You don’t go out again right off. You let your guardians settle back into the easy comfort of routine, where they won’t keep such a close eye on you. It’s one of those gut instincts you get, knowing this will make it easier on you in the long run. You lose the lingering stiffness from the explosions. You find yourself comforted by routine as well; falling back into well worn ruts of waking up at dusk, planned meals, and absolutely no one touching you.

You take up embroidery, making long reams of brocaded silk showing great dedication to technical skill but very little imagination. You get examined, even, once, by a human doctor who had lobbied the colonial government for permission to examine a seadweller and do something with the data that you found utterly uninteresting. You’d heard the governor discussing the petition over the breakfast table, and, still fang deep in your pound of bacon, you’d demanded that he not only accept it, but you take the privilege of being the examinee. Your guardians are very unhappy with the idea, but you duck your head and agree and then do what you want anyway. He examines you through a sheet, his hands from the elbow down poking out of slits in the fabric. He touches your gut, the crescive struts of your thoracic cage, ask questions in a timorous voice that you mostly ignore.

Like, “what is your level of physical activity, your serene highness?” and “do you know your caloric intake, illustrious heiress?” You shrug at him. That’s the kind of shit he can figure out from anyone. He doesn’t seem to be appreciating that he’s knuckles deep in the Imperial body. It’s a rare privilege and a personal one you’re granting him. His accent is excellent but his declensions are offensively common and he refers to you with pronouns meant for edible inanimate objects. You bite him hard on the hand before he leaves, like the little savage you are, in return for the insult. You assume he doesn’t catch something from, but you’re kind of hoping he does.

Being that you are a gift to the people from a benevolent deity, you consider it your duty to get back out in the city. Slowly, by degrees and sorely testing your own patience, as everyone settles back into complacency, you ready yourself. When the chance comes, on a shivery cold night between guard rotations, you take it and bolt. You skitter down empty streets, kicking ahead pieces of rubble, and shying away from loud booms in the distance.

You end up in the center of the city, well away from the Imperial quarter, among the tenant slums. The city is divided into concentric rings, with the poorest crowded into the middle-you know the map as well as anyone. You snatch a shirt and jeans off a clothing line, ducking into shadowy rubble to struggle into the ratty things. The symbol is some intricate rustblood swoop. You stuff your own clothing into the holes in the wall, heedlessly tearing the priceless brocade.

You’re hardly inconspicuous among them, but any sideways looks only earns a snarl and a snap of teeth. They leave you well enough alone. The explosions are further away here, with only the rattle of minichail fire. You’d like to know where anyone in this city managed to get their hands on minichails; standardized Imperial guard weaponry, firing depleted uranium slugs, and while they’re not impossible to acquire, they’re very closely monitored because a minichail packs enough power to knock a psionic bolt out of the way.

You’re being followed, of course. You stick out like a bloody thumb, even in your stolen clothing. Your horns are at least twice as long as any of the lowbloods here, and the humans look like they’ve never seen anything with fins before. A human grub gawks openly at you, and you squat down to gawk back at it. You’re far from full grown, but you’re tyrian long and lean, and you well tower over even the grub’s lusus. The grub has a small round face, with sweet, huge dull eyes. Human eyes lack a precision, some critical depth to raise them from animal to person. The grub does not look you in the eyes. You begin to glow along your arms and shoulders, the small speckles of your bioluminescence going up like stars in the dim street.

The grub sparks and snaps, flaring with a click like a lighter.

“Is that normal?” you ask no one in particular. As everyone around you begins to panic at the burning grub, you assume that that is not, in fact, normal for humans. You sidestep behind the grub into the doorway, moving out of the line of sniper fire, and begin to crawlstep your way back out of the slum. Your tail steps out behind you the moment the wall falls away behind you at a turn in the road, and you turn to face the same little lowblood chick that killed you the last time.

“Sup,” she says casually.

“You know,” you say, feeling the hair at the back of your neck stand up. The lowblood chick, blowsy red in the eyes, has a weight and a heft to her. Psionic, or something near like; as you’ve grown, your sensitivity to ghosts and the things they leave behind has grown.

“The usual?” she asks. A piece of sidewalk next to her sneaker flares purple along the edges and lifts like gravity isn’t a constant, turning in slow lazy arcs at your eye level.

“Yeah,” you say. The chick whistles.

“That bad, huh,” she muses. “Well. Sorry. It’s about to get a whole lot worse.”

You’re just starting to duck when the chunk of sidewalk craters the side of your face in. You burst sideways a couple of steps, crashing into the side of a building. You see red, and red, and a bright dizzy slash of purple when the lowblood chick whips her chunk of sidewalk back around herself in a showy spiral. You weave, struggling to keep your balance with the sloshing pain in your skull. Through the blur and the blood all over you, you see four, six, eight, fifteen shadows line up around you.

“Caught me surrounded, you poar bastards,” you hiss, spitting out six molars and a long spew of blood. The teeth will have grown back in two hours.

“Bitch, you really gotta start staying out of our way,” the lowblood chick says. She almost sounds worried. You touch the wreck of the left side of your face. Blood and loose meat; gilded Midas crowned in raw steak. You have no doubt the damage is significant and unattractive. You spit again.

“You shoulda stayed the fuck away from me,” you say sulkily, touching your teeth through the hole in your jaw. You feel grudging admiration for the force and precision of the lowblood chick’s psionics. “You shoulda been a helmsman. Fuck you.”

“Thanks,” she says, sounding both queasy and pleased. “What, you gonna give me ten pretty ships and hook me up all nice and obedient? Pull a chariot for the bitch ground my planet under her shiny gold heel? Like fuck.”

“Well,” you say. “Shipside service is gonna be a shell of a sight pleasanter than the other side of my fist.”

“Oh, do,” she taunts. “Hit me, queen bitch, empress, bitch, bitch, bitch. Useless little monarchic fucktoy.”

“Fancy,” you tell her, genuinely impressed. You swing your horns goring low when you punch her anyway. She crumples, just misses impalement, and falls to the pavement. A piece of rock whizzes past your head. You book it ass to heels out of there. A good thirteen of them come after you; you’re cold in the blood, you can hold out for miles, but, oh, are you ever slow. You keep pounding pavement anyway. They know the area better than you, but there was only the one teek among them, and she’s daylights knocked three blocks back. You only have to make it to the Imperial quarter. You scramble up a drainpipe, jarring your elbows with your knees in your haste. You hurl yourself over the edge of the roof and work your fingers into the rusted metal, prying loose the top of the drain pipe. It creaks ominously, keeling backwards at an angle under the weight of the three lowbloods nearest to you. You snap your teeth at them, pop up onto your feet, and throw yourself off the other side of the roof.

You are pretty reckless by nature, although not necessarily to the point where you risk breaking your neck by hurling yourself off a three story building. Thing about knowing the map is, though, you also know how close the bay warps to the street here, and you crash ten feet into the water without hurting yourself much more. The water stings on your face, but the waves pull the blood out of your eye and your vision clears. They can come after you if they want, but this is your true domain. You struggle out of the stolen shirt, losing it somewhere in a wave, and kick off away from it. You see a couple of splashes behind you, and you dive. If they have grenades, you’re getting the fuck out of range.

You are sopping when you surface in the Imperial quarter. The guards, to their detriment, do not recognize you. You decide to leave their punishment for later. The first thing you do that night is shave your hair close down in the back, except for two narrow braids behind each of your ears. The thick dandelion fluff left behind is a pleasure to ruffle with your hands. Your guardians are apoplectic with disgust and worry when they locate you in your quarters.

“Who even gives a shit,” you say flippantly. You are bleeding from three places along the height of your jawbone. Your teeth are neatly visible from just past the center of your mouth to the midpoint of your cheek, all the blood carefully scrubbed off with a mandiblescraper. The missing teeth are beginning to show the gummy ridges of replacements. You are missing a significant chunk of eyebrow. You kind of wish you still had a mouthful of blood. You’d enjoyed the experience.

You didn’t want power to begin with-heavy lies the head that wears the crown, after all-but it’s becoming more appealing. No one tells an Empress what to do if they want to keep their tongue. A gilded messy girl becoming a gilded slave of the people is not an attractive end, but that only means that you’ll have to dismantle everything that will get in your way. No magistrates, no Imperial council, no guardians, no checks and balances to coddle your power along until you are nothing more than an extension of another’s influence. That is not you. That is not Meenah Peixes.

This power is your birthright. Your Ancestor is the very woman who built this glorious blaze of an empire with spit and labor. It will be yours this identical minute.

You challenge the Reigning Empress to your right to rule by force. It is an ancient protocol, an old world one. It is fitting. You will be an old world empress.

The Reigning Empress kills you, but not for the afterlife are you. You are back on your feet before she has finished her victory speech. She is dead before she has had time to draw breath. There are no laws against a revenant empress, and the people adore you. They have seen stranger, brutaler things. Lights go up. Balls last for days. Parades send off enough confetti to choke whole cities, and a billion people die in the celebrations. Everything is gold, and gold, and gold again. This is yours and you will keep it.

“Morningstar Empress,” they call you, and a dozen other things, long unwieldy titles that you preen under the weight of. Our Lady of a Thousand Worlds, Beast of the Pit. You sit in your smallest sitting room, the least ornate, the most comfortable of all of them in this palace on this planet, and you listen to the low slow funeral dirge of a mothergrub under your feet. They cry, always, the mothergrubs.

You dream, more than you ever did. Certainly there are taxes and meetings and colony charters to sign, and there are things to do and things to do. Makes you sleep harder, you think, but it might just be the strangeness of not living on Earth as you have for most of your life. A more sedentary childhood than most of your predecessors, for one. Maybe more so than any save the First, the Big, the Ancestor.

You dream of her, especially. Tall and narrow and hawk faced, you as her miniature, sitting on opposite sides of a table and drinking tea. Tangling her hands in the biowires holding up her dead helmsman. Nothing ever very useful, but you get a few good ideas for things to stitch into your methodical brocades.

Once, though, when you’re early in your years still but the throne is warming to your weight, your Ancestor not only knows she’s in your dream, she knows she’s dead. It takes you a bit to realize that she’s a ghost, not a figment of your imagination. You suppose it was only a matter of time before your sensitivity to ghosts caught up to you.

She’s taller than you by far, and the long hooks of her horns look like they pierce the sky from your position on the floor. There are ropes of bells woven into her hair; it isn’t caught into two neat braids like yours, but is a brilliant wild sweep of an uncombed mess. You touch the down at the back of your head and wonder if maybe you shouldn’t have shaved it down.

There is a sign cut into her hand, gone ruddy with age. She catches you staring.

“Old world slang,” she says with a little toss of her head. Her hair ripples with the silver noise of bells. “It means ‘doesn’t stay dead’. Supposed to be a warning.”

“Or a promise,” you say slyly. “A threat.”

“Not bad,” she says, looking down her long nose at you. You can’t read Old High Alternian, but you like the look of the hieroglyph. "Say, shrimp. What do you know about blowing up suns?"


End file.
